With development of the television network and growing pressure from the competition, in the field of program content provision, cable network operators are faced with a lot of challenges. They must deploy brand-new and customized services to meet requirements of customers, for example, implement targeted advertisement insertion by using a digital television program inserting technology.
An advertiser desires to place advertisements to specific household set-top boxes by using cable television or interactive Internet Protocol television (IPTV) according to particular attribute information of each household, such as income, race, number of members, and consumption habits, and by using the digital television program inserting technology, so that a customized advertisement is played for each household.
At present, most multi-service operators use a region-targeted advertisement mode to allow local cable or interactive IPTV operators to insert targeted advertisements in their own advertisement regions to replace nation-wide advertisements inserted between programs by using region-targeted advertisement insertion. The region-targeted advertisements may be used in cities, residential communities, or even an area with a specific population. For example, long-term health care and insurance advertisements are placed to an area populated with old residents, and programs played in college towns can include advertisements targeted at college students.
During implementation of the present invention, the inventors find that the conventional art has at least the following problems: the conventional region-targeted advertisements are all based on geographical divisions, and the same region covers a lot of households having different user attributes, but advertisements with the same content are played to the region, and placing precision of the region-targeted advertisements is low so that many users temporarily leave the television sets in the event of advertisements. Consequently, the conventional region-targeted advertisements have a low audience rating and benefits of advertisers cannot be ensured.